Christian Bioethics, 17(1), 5463, 2011 doi:10.

1093/cb/cbr009

Advance Access publication on May 20, 2011

Kierkegaards Ethics of Agape, the Secularization of the Public Square, and Bioethics
AARON E. HINKLEY*
Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA *Address correspondence to: Aaron E. Hinkley, M.A., Department of Philosophy, MS-14, Rice University, 1892 Houston, TX 72251. E-mail: hinkley@rice.edu.

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Because of the radically incarnational nature of the Christian understanding of ethics and bioethics, according to Kierkegaard, there has always been an infinite gulf between Christian bioethics and secular bioethics. However, the process of the secularization of the public square has made this gulf more apparent and salient for the current ethical debates in biomedicine and the culture more generally. Keywords: agape, bioethics, Christian ethics, Kierkegaard, secularization, the public square I. INTRODUCTION The secularization of the public sphere has taken place gradually since the late Middle Ages. Over the past two centuries, the public sphere in the United States has gone from a default position of at least nominal Protestant Christianity to one that is in almost all contexts largely, if not entirely, secularized.1 One effect of these developments has created the impression of an ever widening gulf between secular and Christian ethical reflections, in general, and bioethics in particular. However, one might quite rightly be led to wonder: what is the true nature of the division between the Christian and the secular? Moreover, why did anyone ever believe that it was possible for secular philosophy to replicate, in the absence of Christianity, the results and conclusions of a Christian ethics/bioethics? Nonetheless, the view that Christian and a truly rational, secular ethics will arrive at similar conclusions could be construed as the central assumption and fundamental conceit of both the Natural Law tradition in Roman Catholic moral theology as well as Hegels categorial reconceptualization of Christianity
The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of The Journal of Christian Bioethics, Inc. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

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in the terms of secular, discursive philosophical reason. Here, Kierkegaards attempt to liberate authentic Christianity from secularization at the hands of Hegel in particular and philosophy more generally proves instructive.2 In this paper, I will argue that not only are Christian and secular bioethics distinct de facto, but they in essence must be; this paper will achieve this task by sketching a brief interpretation of certain aspects of Kierkegaards philosophy. The process of secularization, therefore, has not been a growing apart of secularism and Christianity, but instead a concerted effort to eliminate what had been in the United States the nominally the traditionally Protestant background assumptions of its public square. II. KIERKEGAARD, DIVINE REVELATION, AND THE ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SECULAR AND CHRISTIAN ETHICS
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For Kierkegaard, the gulf separating Christian ethics and secular ethics is an essential, necessary, and, indeed, infinite one. The foundational fact of Christianity is the Incarnation. God the Word, the second person of the Holy Trinity, takes on human nature, truly becoming a man and at the very same time remaining divine, living a human life, dying a servants death, being resurrected from the dead, and ascending to the right hand of God the Father. These are not a priori metaphysical truths about the constitution and origin of universe; they are particular events taking place in the course of human history. What separates the secular and Christian ethical world views is their relationship to the particular life of the person of God incarnate that as such cannot be reduced to propositional content, not simply because of the paradoxical nature of the infinite becoming finite and the eternal entering the temporal but also the irreducibly of finite, temporal existence to comprehensive conceptualization by rational, philosophical reflection.3 In the words of Kierkegaards pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, in Philosophical Fragments if the god did not come himself, then everything would remain Socratic, we would not have the moment, and we would fail to obtain the paradox (55). That is, were it not for the historical event of Incarnation, Christianity would not be anything at all, let alone something distinct from secular philosophical thought. More importantly, for Kierkegaard, given that it must central to any authentic Christian self-understanding, Christianity can never understand itself as being reducible or commensurable to secular philosophical reflections.4 Moreover, according to Kierkegaard, authentic, faithful Christianity is the only possible way of experiencing and relating ones self to the fact of the Incarnation and the saving and redeeming acts of Jesus Christs death on the cross, His resurrection, and His ascension in glory.5 Moreover, it is from this central fact of the Incarnation and the example set by the life of Christ

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that all genuinely Christian ethics and bioethics must flow because, as Kierkegaard in Works of Love clearly appreciates, And was not Christ love? But he came into the world to become prototype in order to draw all men into himself that they might become like him, in truth become his own (247). Moreover, Christian ethics and Christian bioethics cannot be a matter of reasoning to universal principles on the basis of universal, discursive, rational capacities, since it depends necessarily on the actual existence of a singular historical individual, who is God-incarnate. Nor indeed, are they simply the written commands in propositional form of a wholly transcendent God as in other versions of a divine command theories of ethics, such as one finds in the other major monotheistic religions, Judaism and Islam; in a genuine Christian understanding, God remains radically unknowable at the same time that He makes himself known as an incarnate person and serves as an existential and radically personal kind of divine revelation. For authentic Christianity, Christ shows Christians, and indeed all of humanity, how we ought to act by example of the life He led, instead of simply telling Christians what they ought to do in the strict sense of propositional commands. Kierkegaard writes in Practice in Christianity:
Does not Christian teaching about ethics and obligation, Christianitys requirement to die to the world, to surrender the earthly, its requirement of self-denial, does not this contain enough requirements if it were to be obeyed to produce the danger of actuality that makes manifest precisely in this way, that the imitator has his life in these dangers and the admirer remains detached although they both are nevertheless united in acknowledging in words the truth of Christianity? ... The admirer will make no sacrifices, renounce nothing, give up nothing earthly, will not transform his life, will not be what is admired ... The imitator aspires to be what is admired (252).

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In the revelation of Christ, we are given the example whose life we are to imitate, not simply admire. The command of divine revelation in the person of God incarnate does not ask for mere intellectual assent to the conceptual content therein, but instead a likeness toward which one is to grow ever more like.6 They are universally applicable because they are the commandments of the lord and creator of the universe, not because any rational human person as such would be able to arrive at the content of these commands through philosophical thought and careful reflection. Now that we have taken a look at the form of Christian ethics in the person of God incarnate, we will turn to a sketch of Kierkegaards understanding of the content of that revelation. Of course, as should already be apparent, for Kierkegaard, in an authentic understanding of Christianity, Christian ethics, and Christian bioethics, there is not a genuine distinction between its form and content as they are the life of a real existing person, Jesus Christ, God incarnate. The content is the example set by the life of Christ; the form is the life of God incarnate. They cannot in actuality be distinguished from one another as the Incarnation itself is a self-sacrificial act of an infinitely loving God.

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III. NONPREFERENTIAL, SELF-SACRIFICIAL LOVE AS THE FORM AND CONTENT OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND CHRISTIAN BIOETHICS As we have seen, for Kierkegaard, an authentic Christian ethics are revealed in the life of the person of God incarnate, Jesus Christ. In this section, we will show how according to Kierkegaard the life of Christ, which is to serve as the example for the Christian life, is not merely the form of revelation of Christianity but is also the content of that revelation. In the person of Christ, we have the paradigmatic example of nonpreferential, self-sacrificial love, agape. His life does not simply show what it is, but His life also instantiates in the world and how agape is to show forth within the world of human existence and thus determines how human persons ought to act toward others, that is, their neighbors.7 God is in Himself a community of three divine persons existing in a relationship of Love.8 It is in the life of the incarnate Word of God, the fully divine and fully human person of Christ, that the implications of divine love are fully revealed for humans.9 In the prayer preceding the actual text of Works of Love, Kierkegaard writes:
How could love be rightly discussed if You were forgotten, O God of Love, source of all love in heaven and on earth, You who spared nothing but gave all in love, You who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in You! How could love properly be discussed if You were forgotten, You who made manifest what love is, You, our Savior and Redeemer, who gave Yourself to save all! How could love be rightly discussed if You were forgotten, O Spirit of Love, You who take nothing for Your won but remind us of that sacrifice of love, remind the believer to love as he is loved, and his neighbor as himself (34).

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For an authentic understanding of Christianity, according to Kierkegaard, God is the foundation of love, every instance of human love in order to truly be love at all, must be founded in Gods love that exists between the divine persons of the Trinity and has instantiated itself toward mankind in the saving and redeeming works of God-incarnate. Concerning the role of Gods love in constituting the foundation of the world and human love, Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love:
As the quiet lake is fed deep down by the flow of hidden springs, which no eye sees, so a human beings love is grounded, still more deeply, in Gods love. If there were no spring at the bottom, if God were not love, then there would be neither a little lake nor a persons love . As the still waters begin obscurely in the deep spring, so a mans love mysteriously begins in Gods love (27).

As one commentator summarizes the point made here, The ground or foundation of human existence and Christian faith is Gods love.10 Gods superabundant love is the reason He freely chooses to create the universe ex nihilo and then subsequently form humanity in His image for the purpose of growing further in His likeness. Moreover, Gods love is the ground of the

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worlds continuation in being, and it makes possible a relationship of love between human persons, not merely as an ethical paradigm in the person of God-incarnate but also as its ultimate ontological foundation. For Kierkegaard, humans only adequately love one another when they love God first. By loving God, humans are able to understand what love is, and then as such to love their neighbor and other persons. According to Kierkegaard, Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person-God-a person, that is, that God is the middle term (107). Love of God makes it possible for us to love one another. If we do not love God first and foremost, our love for others will be subject to all of the potential pitfalls of preferential whims and desires. He argues:
The God-relationship is the mark whereby love towards men is recognized as genuine love. As soon as a love-relationship does not lead me to God, and as soon as I in a love-relationship do not lead another person to God, this love, even if it were the most blissful and joyous attachment, even if it were the highest good in the lovers earthly life, nevertheless is not true love. The world can never get through its head that God in this way not only becomes the third party in every relationship of love but essentially becomes the only loved object ... The purely human conception of love can never go further than mutuality: that the lover is the beloved and the beloved is the lover. Christianity teaches that such a love has not yet found its proper object: God. The love-relationship is a triangular relationship of the lover, the beloved, love- but love of God. Therefore to love another person means to help him to love God and to be loved means to be helped (181).

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Not only is an authentic Christian love brought about by the love of God in the first place, but loving another person, ones neighbor, ones children, ones wife or husband, is to help the beloved also come to love God, and being loved in return is being helped, also, to love God more and more. Loving God means that we will nonpreferentially and self-sacrificially love our neighbor.11 This does not mean, of course, that the Christian will not act lovingly towards close to him, but that by loving God primarily and ones neighbors, that is all other persons, the individual Christian comes to be able to love, his or her family and friends, more genuinely (Evans, 2004). One interpreter writes:
For Kierkegaard, to be a Christian in the most radical sense of the term is to exist in the world in an ethico-religious modality ... insofar as it is constituted within a double relation: it is religious insofar as it requires that we exist before God, that we are absolutely bonded to him as the center of our lives; it is ethical insofar as it also requires that we exist in a sundered/bonded relation to the world, the center of which is our neighbor. For Kierkegaard, to exist in this mode is to be fully human, to exist as a person, as oneself; it is to be willing to be the self that we are called to be; it is to actualize actuality (Hall, 200).

In Gods revelation to humanity in the person of Christ, we discover that we are not just bound by obligation to God Himself, but we are also bound by

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God in an ethical relation of obligatory nonpreferential, self-sacrificing love, agape, to other humans patterned after the life of Him that revealed such a fully human life to us. IV. KIERKEGAARD, CHRISTENDOM, AND CHRISTIAN BIOETHICS IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE The situation of the Christian bioethicist operating in the public square of the United States today is an unusual one indeed. Most Americans are at least nominally Christian, yet at the very same time the dominant culture is quite often openly hostile to any serious reference to religious commitments in general and Christianity in particular. This was not always the case; well into the twentieth century, the public square was nominally Protestant Christian at least in so far as traditional Protestant Christian background assumptions informed any discussion of ethical issues in general and bioethical issues in particular. While these changes in the United States have been mostly confined to the last half century, Kierkegaard was familiar with similar secularizing developments in the Denmark of the nineteenth century. Indeed, his primary target, Hegel and the Danish Hegelians, are in his sights because of their deflation of the ontological and ethical claims of Christianity and their fundamental seriousness. Kierkegaard is supremely skeptical of the idea that a nation or a public square could ever be genuinely Christian. Yet even here Kierkegaard is again instructive because of his work in criticizing the leveling and destructive influence of the secularization of the Danish bourgeois had on the Lutheran Church in Denmark at the time. While Kierkegaard argues that it would be mistaken to equate the public sphere in a country where a majority of the population is Christian with Christianity as such. Under his pseudonym Johannes Climacus in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard claims:
By reason of the infiltration of the State and social groups and the congregation and society, God can no longer get a hold of the individual ... they have shown Him the door. They are busy about getting a truer and truer conception of God but seem to forget the very first step, that one should fear God. A man who in the objective mass of men is objectively religious does not fear God (4834).

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That is not to argue that there is not an objective, public component to religious faith, but that religious faith is not exhausted by these objective, public behaviors, and actions. There is a necessary inner, subjective component of religious faith required for some person to be genuinely and authentically Christian. In that way, according to Kierkegaard, the public square, even when the United States was at least a nominally Protestant Christian nation, was not necessarily Christian. While there certainly were traditional background assumptions shared by the public square in the United States and Christianity morality, that is, marriage understood as an institution between

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one man and one woman, the immorality of homosexual activity, pre- and extramarital sexual relations, and surgical abortion, and an understanding that an appropriate standard of morality would not permit anything and everything that consenting adults might choose to do in private, according to Kierkegaard, it would be fundamentally mistaken to conflate the two, as one is objective and the other has an essentially subjective core. The conflation of the objective and the subjective is a mark of the secularization of modernity. Indeed, Kierkegaard, through his pseudonym Climacus, argues:
In the midst of the self-importance of the contemporary generation there is revealed a sense of despair over being human. Everything must attach itself so as to be a part of some movement; men are determined to lose themselves in the totality of things, in world-history, fascinated and deceived by a magic witchery; no one wants to be an individual human being ... only in great masses do they dare to live, and they cluster together en masse in order to feel that they amount to something (318).

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However, what is radically different about the situation in the United States, now in 2011 as opposed to 1811, 1911, or indeed even as recently as 1961, for example, has been the overwhelming success of the efforts by secularists, not only to replace the marginally Protestant background assumptions of the public sphere with secular ones but also to banish any substantive references to Christianity or Christian morality and bioethics, or indeed any serious religious commitment to a truly transcendent source of value or understanding of the good and the right, from serious public discourse.12 The public square has become openly hostile, in most regards, to Christianity. V. CONCLUDING UN-BIOETHICAL POSTSCRIPT Ultimately, all of this means that the gulf between the Christian and secular bioethics is irremediable, whether by means of discursive philosophy or any other way one might imagine. Indeed, such a gulf between the two is infinitely wide. The history of secularization and the widening gulf has not, therefore, been a growing apart of secularism and Christianity, but a substantive removal of Christianity and Christian ethical background assumptions from the public square. So this appearance of a widening gulf has been a result of the fact that secularism has made a concerted effort to push Christianity and Christian morality out of the realm of consideration. The contemporary secular public square demands that any view expressed therein in order to be taken seriously or open for consideration be formulated with secular concepts and in secular terms. However, as we have seen because of the infinite ontological distance between Christian ethics and secular ethics makes it impossible to express genuinely and authentically Christian ethics in terms of the concepts of secular reason secular bioethical and ethical reflection have over time made a concerted effort to remove or

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at least deflate Christian bioethics and Christian moral reflections more generally from the space of the public discourse. However, the public space of moral, ethical, and ultimately political debate need not be antipathetical to Patristic Christianity and its authentic modes of ethical and moral action and reflection as long as divergent points of view are permitted to express their own terms that may very well be incommensurable with the dictates of secular rationality. NOTES
1. In his essay Freedom and Decency appearing in First Things, Eastern Orthodox academic theologian, David Bentley Hart writes, modernity is secularization. It is, in its essence, a project of detaching moral, legal, and governmental reasoning from any authority transcendent of the state or the individual. It is the project of an ethics conformed not to divine justice but to human reason and popular consensus; of a politics authorized not by divine ordinance but by the absolute sovereignty of the nation-state; and of a model of freedom based not on the perfection of human nature but on the unconstrained liberty of individual will. It is, therefore, inevitable that the public square in a modern, secular society would eliminate all reference to or discussion of any transcendent values, let alone an authentic Patristic understanding of Christianity, that could possibly restrict the ability of people to choose according to their own particular volitions and inclinations. This is because claims about what it is truly good or really right in the space of reasons would serve as an impediment to individuals living in accordance with their whims and desires. 2. In his book, Kierkegaards Critique of Reason and Society, Merold Westphal writes, With Abrahams help, Kierkegaard plans a double assault on the central thesis of Hegels mature speculation, to which the opening five paragraphs of the Encyclopedia are devoted. That would be the claim that Hegels philosophy contains the same content as the Christian religion, but in the superior form of philosophical concept, Begriff, rather than the religious form Hegel labels Vorstellung. Kierkegaards first challenge will be to the supremacy of the concept, the second to the identity of the content (62). For Kierkegaard, the problem of Hegel and the Roman Catholic Natural Law tradition in ethics is two-fold. They place primacy on a rationalized conceptual understanding of Christianity. Moreover, they purport to render Christianity into fully rational philosophical conceptual content available to rational person as such. Kierkegaard wants to show that the conceptual is not actually primary, and that this rendering of Christianity conceptual is not an authentic interpretation of Christianity. 3. Kierkegaard writes in Johannes Climacus, Christianitys claim that it had come into the world by a beginning that was simultaneously historical and eternal had caused philosophy much difficulty (1345). The historical event of the Incarnation, wherein the infinite and eternal Word of God becomes a finite, temporal human person while at the same time also retaining His transcendent, divine nature. 4. That is not to say that nothing about Christianity or Christian ethics can be translated into purely secular terms. Certain Christian ethical views on particular issues can no doubt be expressed in terms comprehensible by non-Christians by means of secular reasons, that is, none of this is to deny that there are potentially non-Christian reasons to be morally opposed to abortion, homosexual activity, pre- and extra-marital sexual relations, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research that destroys human embryos, pornography, the sexualizing and coarsening of popular culture, and so on. However, the ultimate reason authentic Christians hold these views will differ in an essential way from non-Christian or secular reasons because all Christian ethical views are ultimately grounded in the truth of the Incarnation and the example of non-preferential, self-sacrificing love of the neighbor established by the example of Jesus Christ, God the Word incarnate. 5. Such an understanding is beautifully by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his notes for his novel The Possessed, Christ walked on earth to show mankind that even in its earthly nature the human spirit can manifest itself in heavenly radiance, in the flesh, and not merely in dream or ideal. We see here that Christs example of self-sacrificing, nonpreferential love, agape, is the paradigm by which humans can fulfill their nature by growing in likeness to God. 6. In his book Incarnate Love, Vigen Guroian writes, Christs rules and commandments are obligatory not because he is an author whose reason and purpose are external to us, but because they belong

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as virtue to the total character of him who shares the same ontological status with us as a human being in whom that humanity has reached full maturity. The great emphasis upon obedience to these commandments in Orthodox theology is not a commitment to a myriad of rules for the sake of duty to some objective, extrapersonal, moral order. Rather, it reflects a faithfulness to the anthropic vocation of human persons and to the on Person who fulfilled that vocationthe one in whom was revealed in the fullness of time Gods plan of salvation (Eph. 1:910 RSV). 7. As Michael Plekon notes in his essay, Prophetic Criticism, Incarnational Optimism: On Recovering the Late Kierkegaard, In Works of Love, Kierkegaard does not simply juxtapose the vertical relationship of God and humankind with the horizontal relationship of neighbour to neighbour. Rather, Kierkegaard entwines them and makes them interpenetrate. God is the source of every person and is the `third party in every human relationship. Gods love is not only the source but also the pattern for human love: creative, nurturing, enduring, forgiving. 8. As Romanian Orthodox theologian Fr. Dumitru Staniloae writes in his work The Experience of God, Love in the world presupposes as its origin and purpose the eternal perfect love between a number of divine persons. This love does not produce the divine persons ... but presupposes them. Otherwise it would be possible to conceive of an impersonal love that produced and dissolved human persons. From eternity the divine persons remain perfect, for their love is that perfection of love which is not able to increase the communion among them. Were this not the case, the origin of all things would have begun from utmost separation, from absence of love. Love, however, presupposes a common being in three persons, as Christian teaching tells us (245). 9. In Kierkegaards Journals and Papers, concerning the Incarnation and its implications for the world, he writes, Creation is really fulfilled only when God has included himself in it. Before Christ, God was included, of course, in the creation, but as an invisible mark, something like the watermark in paper. But in the Incarnation, creation is fulfilled by Gods including himself in it (1391). 10. Michael Plekon, Prophetic Criticism, Incarnational Optimism: On Recovering the Late Kierkegaard in Religion 13, 147. 11. In her commentary on Kierkegaards Works of Love, Loves Grateful Striving, M. Jamie Ferriera writes, Love of neighbor (Kjerlighed) is distinguished from preferential love (Forkjerlighed) precisely because neighbor is the category of equality before God and preferential love does not do justice to equality .... In particular, I want to suggest that Kierkegaard is offering neither an attack on all self-love nor a denial of the legitimate role of preference and inclination in erotic love and friendship; rather, he wants to preserve the integrity of the other, the genuine you. (44). In concert with such a view, Merold Westphal writes in Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue, Kierkegaard regularly insists that love is selfdenial and self-sacrifice in opposition to self-centered self-love. But he also emphasizes that there is a proper self-love that goes with love for God and neighbor (WL 18, 22, 107, 130) .... If God loves me I can love myself, and just as Gods love for me doesnt place me at the center with everyone else a means to my ends, so my own proper self-love will be modeled on Gods love for me (56). 12. In another essay by David Bentley Hart, Christ and Nothing that also appears in First Things, he writes, We live in an age whose chief moral value has been determined, by overwhelming consensus, to be the absolute liberty of personal volition, the power of each of us to choose what he or she believes, wants, needs, or must possess; our culturally most persuasive models of human freedom are unambiguously voluntarist and, in a rather debased and degraded way, Promethean; the will, we believe, is sovereign because un-premised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good. And a society that believes this must, at least implicitly, embrace and subtly advocate a very particular moral metaphysics: the unreality of any value higher than choice, or of any transcendent Good ordering desire towards a higher end. Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not wantbut not to obey. Society must thus be secured against the intrusions of the Good, or of God, so that its citizens may determine their own lives by the choices they make from a universe of morally indifferent but variably desirable ends, unencumbered by any prior grammar of obligation or value (in America, we call this the wall of separation). Hence the liberties that permit one to purchase lavender bed clothes, to gaze fervently at pornography, to become a Unitarian, to market popular celebrations of brutal violence, or to destroy ones unborn child are all equally intrinsically good because all are expressions of an inalienable freedom of choice. But, of course, if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index. Because the concept of self-ownership and the freedom of personal choice is the highest value

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of the secular culture, a secularized public sphere seeks to eliminate reference to any consideration higher than the authority of the individual will. It is illustrative that despite their substantive political disagreements about the scope of the state and its intervention into the social and economic spheres, secular political thinkers as divergent as Robert Nozick in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971), and Jerry Cohen in Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995), all consider individual self-ownership to be a foundational consideration in structuring a just society. So, though they disagree wildly about how best to create the conditions that actually allow for its fullest allowable achievement, these major secular political thinkers take for granted that individuals have the ability to determine for themselves their own understanding of human flourishing and how it is to be achieved, assuming that it does not unduly prevent other individuals from also making the same sorts of choices on the basis of their own values, desires, and inclinations.

REFERENCES
Cohen, G. A. 1995. Self-ownership, freedom, and equality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Evans, C. S. 2004. Kierkegaards ethics of love: Divine commands and moral obligations. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Ferriera, M. J. 2001. Loves grateful striving: A commentary on Kierkegaards works of love. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Guroian, V. 2002. Incarnate love: Essays in orthodox ethics; 2nd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Hall, A. L. 2002. Kierkegaard and the treachery of love. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hart, D. B. 2003. Oct. Christ and nothing. First things. Available: http://www.firstings.com/ article/2007/12/christ-and-nothing-28 (Accessed January 16, 2011). . 2004. June/July. Freedom and decency. First things. Available: http://www.firstthings. com/article/2008/10/freedom-and-decency-12 (Accessed January 16, 2011). Kierkegaard, S. 1985. Philosophical fragments and Johannes Climacus. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (trans. and Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 1991. Practice in Christianity. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (trans. and Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 1992. Concluding unscientific postscript, vol. 1. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (trans. and Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. . 1995. Works of love. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (trans. and Ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books. Plekon, M. 1983. Prophetic criticism, incarnational optimism: On recovering the late Kierkegaard. Religion 13:217. . 1992. Kierkegaard the theologian: The roots of his theology in works of love. In Foundations of Kierkegaards vision of community: Religion, ethics, and politics in Kierkegaard, ed. G. B. Connell, and C. S. Evans. London: Humanities Press. Rawls, J. 1971. A theory of justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Staniloae, D. 1994. Orthodox dogmatic theology: The experience of God. I. Ionita and R. Barringer (trans. and Ed.). Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press. Westphal, M. 1991. Kierkegaards critique of reason and society. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. . 2008. Levinas and Kierkegaard in dialogue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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